As a student – back when the internet was in it’s infancy and Googling wasn’t a thing yet – distance learning was quite different than it is today. Even though email was available (Hotmail were the must have), the actual courses had not changed that much since the days of snail mail. In most courses you had nothing but a textbook to learn from, with a few innovative courses including audio lectures on CDs as well – no videos, no discussion boards, no interactive anything. Sure they had learning objectives, but as a student I recall having no idea what they were. I’d never seen them before, so didn’t know how to make use of them. Plus, most of them didn’t even make sense.

I took a few of these distance learning courses and in nearly every case my experiences was the same. Assignments were easy – complete them adequately and you got an A+ – but they never actually prepared you for the final exam. Nothing seemed to do that, not even the learning objectives (which as I said earlier didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me). In short, the courses left you feeling upstream without a paddle; did they really expect the student (inexperienced paddler) to know what to do? In some ways I felt thrown to the wolves, and expected to just pass.

Today, as a facilitator of online (distance) courses, I strive to reduce these issues I had as a student. I personally welcome students to the course, do my best to provide timely feedback, and expect that not everyone will get an A on assignments. Students need a fair assessment of their understanding, not a “you found the information in the textbook” pat on the back. Of course, this shift also aligns with the changes seen in academia more broadly: Today’s focus on applying concepts and developing critical thinking skills, lies in contrast to the focus on basic understanding of information common several decades ago.

In addition to this, I like to make sure there are sources of information other than the written word to ensure there are different ways for students to engage with the content. I like to include videos that explain difficult concepts, as well as talks by important researchers explaining their own work – sometimes these are short TED talks, sometimes longer public lectures. The point is that students have the choice to watch as well as read.

A foundational element that was missing from the courses I took as a student, that I now strive to build, is a framework for students to organize the information they are learning. This way students are not learning a bunch of disconnected facts, but rather pieces of a bigger puzzle. And finally, when I do engage students online during synchronous meetings (when I have them), I like to discuss the big picture and engage students with questions about how the pieces they are learning fit in. Neither of this was available in my student days.

Distance and online learning has come a long way in the past few decades, but there is still room for improvement. One idea I had for online courses is to have regular live sessions (for example 1x per month). These live sessions would consist of learning activities that connect with the content on the assignments. Society is no longer limited to text only online communication, so why should we as instructors? The challenge will be to figure out how to fit something like this in to a self-paced course where students are not all learning the same thing, at the same pace.